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Liver cancer is one of the most deadly disease around the world. Besides the surgery and chemotherapy, there is no effective treatment which is targeting on cancer cells. In my last post, I discussed the Bcl-2 inhibitor, ABT-263 (Navitoclax) , which is reported to be a effective cancer killer. It is reported that ABT-263 (Navitoclax) is also effective on liver cancer but only in high dose. Besides, there is a small percentage of patients who are not response to such treatment. These results make us to seek combination of drugs to help destroy the defence system of cancer cells. In another word, to induce more apoptosis in low dose. Zhao et al[1] recently reported that the combination of Bcl-2 inhibitor and Survivin together could greatly induce apoptosis in hepatoma cells. First, they used low dose of Bcl-2 inhibitor, ABT-263 (Navitoclax), to treat liver cancer cells. They found no killing effect. And then they used ABT-263 (Navitoclax) along with YM-155, which is a survivin inhibitor, greatly induced apoptosis in hepatoma cells. The authors tried to understand the mechanism of such obvirous killing effect. They used Surivivin siRNA to knock down Survivin and then treat cells with low dose of ABT-263 (Navitoclax). Still, they observed the same apoptotic effect. They hypothesized that the treatment of ABT-263 (Navitoclax) could induce the Raf-MEK-ERK-Survivin pathway, which decreased the toxic effect of ABT-263 (Navitoclax) on cancer cells. By inhibiting Survivin, ABT-263 (Navitoclax) regain the power of killing. The interesting thing is the combination do not have any effect on normal primary hepatocytes. These encouraging results indicate a promising treatment of liver cancer. Reference: [1] PLoS ONE: Research Article, published 01 Aug 2011 10.1371/journal.pone.0021980 Related Posts: 1. Sellective killing cancer cells by small molecule 2. The effective cancer treatment by ABT-888 3. Specific chemopreventive cancer target 4. New potential treatment for liver cancer
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Bcl-2 inhibitor, apoptosis inhibitors, ABT-263,
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